Overview

Traditional research papers are, by and large, an inappropriate measure of student learning in a course such as this, where most students have had no substantive prior exposure to the material, where the materials themselves are so problematic in their anonymous authorship, and where presumably the content itself is not of intrinsic interest and provides only insights into the larger literary traditions in play today.

To support the achievement of the outcomes described in the Course Overview, students in this course will thus exercise and demonstrate their growing understanding of the material in two ways. First, after we read and discuss these works from our personal perspectives in class and on the conferences, each student will be asked to seek out and assess alternative points of view on a particular work available in the professional literature. When completed, each student’s submission will be consolidated into a single document that will be distributed electronically to all seminar members as a possible resource for use should someone confront these texts again in the future.

Then students will be given an opportunity to employ the understanding they have gained by deploying that understanding in response to specific scenarios that attempt to anticipate how it might be called upon in future environments. While those scenarios will have some specificity, each student will be empowered to develop an individual response to them based upon what they have gained and what they have seen as most important in the materials we are confronting. There is no expectation that these exercises will be definitive; it is only hoped that they will be provocative and interesting enough to generate a meaningful effort.

Finally, this will be a two-stage process, with one set of submissions due after we have finished our consideration of the Anglo-Saxon texts on the reading list and the other at the end of the course. The latter will be given significantly more weight than the former in my assessment of student success, allowing the former to be a learning experience in itself. Students should note, however, that these efforts are only part of the evidence I use in my final assessment.

The Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition: what have you learned?

Due: 23 March 2010

1. This course has approached works from a singular perspective; it is only one among many that have been used to approach these works. You, as readers, ultimately will decide for yourselves what persistent value is to be found in these works, but that decision should be based upon more than what has been discussed in this course. Thus you are asked to choose one of the works we have read since the start of the semester and then  identify, read, and evaluate three substantive articles published in academic journals since 1990 on the work you have chosen. Specifically, you are charged to (1) summarize the conclusions and the evidence offered in support of those conclusions in each article; (2) compare and contrast those conclusions to those put forth in this course; and (3) assess the validity and the utility of those conclusions against those put forth in this course as ideas that will shape your future responses to the world around you.The value of this enterprise lies in your efforts to think independently and analytically; my “feelings” will not be “hurt” if you disagree with the conclusions I draw (which are, in any case, only tentative and exploratory). What is important is that you demonstrate an honest effort in thinking about the issues raised in both this course and the articles you read and then in drawing conclusions of use to you, as a person and a student of words, language, and stories.
   
   IMPORTANT NOTE: In order that the compilation of our collective “annotated bibliography” be as comprehensive as possible, each student, before undertaking the collection and analysis of articles on a specific work, must “claim” that work through an entry under the “Bibliography” topic in the Blackboard discussion group (after reviewing others’ claims to avoid duplication). There will be some duplication of works chosen, but I will attempt to manage that by giving or denying approval in light of what has been claimed so far and what remains unclaimed. When two or more students are allowed to treat the same work, they must coordinate among themselves to insure that the three articles each has chosen do not replicate those chosen by others.

2. Respond to this scenario: The Oscher Lifelong Learning Center on campus is planning to offer a series of lectures on Love Poetry for its students, a constituency which is composed of engaged learners attending these lectures out of intellectual curiosity. They are committed students, but are unlikely to have any formal training in literary criticism and only the most general historical awareness. Nonetheless, they are interested in this topic—they’ve already heard presentations on The Song of Songs, the poetry of Sappho, and the Roman poets Ovid, Catullus, and Propertius. Later in the semester, there will be lectures on the Renaissance sonnet tradition, John Donne, Pope’s Eloise and Abelard, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Fitzgerald’s version of the Rubaiyat, and T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

You have been asked to offer a ninety minute presentation on Anglo-Saxon love poetry and, specifically,

The Wife’s Lament (http://research.uvu.edu/mcdonald/Anglo-Saxon/wife'slament/wifetrans.html),

The Husband’s Message (http://www.elfinspell.com/EarlyEnglishHusband.html) and

Wulf and Eadwacer (http://www.rado.sk/old_english/texts/Wulf.html).

Your cash-flow situation makes the honorarium they offer attractive, and so you agree to do so.

But since you haven’t encountered those three poems in your studies—and time is short—you turn to Wikipedia (and that’s not a bad thing to do) and find out that interpreting these poems is intensely problematic, if not impossible, to do with any definitiveness. And so you decide that your larger task is to discuss these three poems first in themselves and then within the larger context of what you know about Anglo-Saxon poetry, culture and values, tying them to the larger context of Anglo-Saxon poetry (with the hope that you will generate enough enthusiasm to warrant another invitation and another honorarium in the future). You’re upfront with the OLLI director and inform him of your intent; he is agreeable, provided that you first give him, in writing, a condensed version of your presentation not to exceed 15 pages.

The Director will be available on the conferences to respond to your questions about this request.

Medieval stories: as they were told at the time and then transformed over time

Due: Noon Thursday, 13 May 2010

1. Continuing to build a bibliographic resource for the group, you are now asked to repeat the process of identifying, analyzing and assessing the critical literature found in professional journals. In this iteration of that process, however, you will now focus on the writings we have covered from the beginnings of the Anglo-Norman period. Further, having become proficient at this activity, you will identify and evaluate six articles; this also responds to the fact that articles on this body of work are more numerous and varied in their approaches. In all other respects, this task will be executed as described earlier.

2. Respond to this scenario: you are preparing to offer a substantial block of instruction on either Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. (You may choose either one and you may define the course and level within which this instruction will be offered). By the time you deliver this instruction, you will have developed a thorough understanding of your chosen author’s thematic concerns which you will set forth in your presentation. At the same time, however, you will also have become acutely conscious that your author’s representation of medieval stories, culture, and values is not only markedly different from those you identified in your own study of the original medieval texts but serves agendas quite different from those served by the source texts.

   Thus you see a unique opportunity to achieve two objectives by examining your chosen text against what you have come to understand about medieval literature: by contrasting what your chosen author does with “the middle ages” to what is represented in truly medieval literature, you can highlight the specific concerns and values of your author by tracking the “transformations” he effects to his chosen ends; at the same time, you can identify those elements arising in medieval literary works that remain central in “modern” society.

   Since such a comparative methodology is suspect in the eyes of the course coordinator, you are asked to present an extensive written analysis of what you have found and what you intend to present in this block of instruction before your plan will be approved.